What is Doxing?

Nowadays as we are growing in the age of the digital world, we use Internet a lot whether for social networking or for shopping or for gaining any kind of knowledge over the web. But for performing either of these activities we need to provide some personal information to the websites as well, for example, if we are accessing any of the social networking sites then we need to provide all our personal information to it in order to create an account and start accessing the website for getting connected to the social world. Even though we are not communicating directly with anyone over the web, we are simply residing behind our monitors or our mobile screens and enjoying the reach of Internet but as we have provided our personal information on various websites, this information can still be at risk of getting into the hands of strangers. This is where the term "Doxing" comes.

Prevent your Information over the Web

What is Doxing?

Doxing can simply be defined as the process of researching or gathering information regarding a person or a company using the Internet, this information can be your Name, Age, your Email Address, City where you live, School name from where you have done your schooling, the office where you work and even your photographs etc. Whenever we go to a particular website and as most of the websites these days ask us to register first before we can actually access all the contents of the website, we tend to provide all of our information over there to the website. Now as if someone at least gets our email address somehow, as we have provided it to a number of places then by using our email address, he can get our name and rest of the information, this is the way Doxing is performed.

The Term Doxing has been coined from Document Tracing that means to collect documents of information regarding an individual or an organization.

Doxing Techniques:

Today Internet has grown so much that it contains information about almost everything, whatever we think whatever we imagine everything exists on the Internet.All you required to do is to find the right tricks and techniques to search for what you require.

Here I am listing down some of the techniques that are used by White Hat Hackers and the Internet Geeks to gather information.

• Using Google, as we all know that google is the biggest and the most popular search engine which is widely used around the globe, and as google keeps an indexing of all the information available over the web. The information that can be easily be found by doing a google search can be your Name, Your email address, phone number, your company name, and address etc.


• Using Social Networking Sites, these sites serves as the biggest source of gathering information about an individual or an organization, as people tends to provide all the information regarding their personal life on sites like these, most Internet geeks prefers social networking sites for Doxing.


• Using Whois Searches, If a person or a company has a website then you can easily find their personal information by performing Whois domain search on the Internet.


• Using Phone Number: If someone has access to your phone number then they can use your phone number to find your personal details over the web as there are many websites that provide these sort of services.

The reason for performing Doxing:

• Most of the time people start searching for someone's information due to curiosity regarding a particular person or an organization.


• Some person performs Doxing with wicked intention of blackmailing a particular after gathering information about them.


• Sometimes Individuals perform Doxing to gather information and after gathering enough information about someone, they start impersonating the person and start talking to another person as them. 


• Revenge can also be thought of as a reason for performing Doxing, as by circulating the collected information to everyone can really irritate a person.
• Have you ever wondered receiving a random email from some random person or a random company, your email address can be one of those emails that have been traced down during the process of Doxing and been sold to some organization along with other thousands of EmailIDs.

Measures that can be taken to prevent Doxing:

• Stop providing your actual details to every website that you visit, first check the authenticity of the website and make sure that your data is secure with them, only then give them the asked details else not.


• If you are uploading a picture of yours on Google Picasa make sure you have added it inside the private folder and it is hidden from the public and the from the eyes of search engines.


• Always try to avoid using your main EmaiID in all the websites, and if you want to provide some website your EmailID makes another ID for these sort of purposes.


• Try to maintain the privacy of highest order in your social networking accounts and make sure your information should only be visible to known persons.

At last, I just want to say that Doxing isn't a crime if it is used with the intention of not harming anyone and not using someone's information for blackmailing or for any other sort of bad activities.